Steyer’s PAC targets 7 races for November

Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer is launching on-the-ground operations to aid Democrats and attack Republicans in seven Senate and gubernatorial races in the midterm elections, all part of his $100 million effort to make climate change a prime campaign issue.

The former hedge fund executive’s super PAC, NextGen Climate Action, is targeting the Senate races in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan and New Hampshire and the governor’s races in Florida, Maine and Pennsylvania, according to NextGen officials who briefed reporters for the first time Wednesday about the scope of the group’s plans.

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Steyer’s multistate push will be the biggest test yet of whether Democrats can take advantage of the freewheeling outside spending wrought by Citizens United, which until now has been wielded most prominently by Republican benefactors like industrialists Charles and David Koch. But his involvement will also provoke a furious counterattack from the GOP, which is already lambasting Democrats as hypocrites who curry favor with Steyer yet demonize the Kochs.

The group’s approach will include reaching out to young, female and minority voters most affected by the threat of climate change.

The Senate races all involve Democratic-held seats that are in danger of flipping to Republicans, including the neck-and-neck contest between embattled Sen. Mark Udall and GOP challenger Rep. Cory Gardner. In contrast, the governor’s races involve states where Democrats are optimistic about unseating Republicans, perhaps most of all with Florida Gov. Rick Scott.

But as expected, NextGen is bypassing key Senate races in which the Democratic incumbent has not put a major priority on climate change and renewable energy. The prime example is Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Mary Landrieu’s reelection bid in Louisiana, where she has been a champion of her state’s oil and gas industry and a vocal supporter of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

While Steyer puts a priority on maintaining Democrats’ majority in the Senate — he donated $5 million to a political committee tasked with getting Senate Democrats reelected — his first order of business is changing the conversation on climate change, said Chris Lehane, a veteran Democratic operative who serves as Steyer’s top political adviser.

“This is the year, in our view, where we’re able to demonstrate that you can use climate, if you do it well and you do it in a smart way, as a wedge issue to win political races,” Lehane said.

Lehane said NextGen could get involved in more states eventually, and he indicated Steyer is already looking ahead to the 2016 presidential race. “Obviously we do have an eye both on 2014 and 2016,” he said, adding that NextGen believes that questioning climate science “functionally disqualifies you from being president.”

Steyer has previously said he’ll spend $50 million or more of his personal fortune on the campaign, a sum he hopes to match with $50 million in donations from green-minded donors. But until now, his group hasn’t fully spelled out all of the states and races where it intends to make its stand.

It’s a formidable task. Voters rate the economy and jobs as much higher priorities than climate change in almost every poll. And most of the Democrats that NextGen is supporting haven’t made climate change a major focus of their campaigns so far, even if they occasionally mention it.

Meanwhile, Republicans have been busy trying to make Steyer a liability for Democrats, accusing them of being “beholden” to his money. Among other accusations, they’ve charged that Steyer is influencing the debate on Keystone, and that he even played a role in Senate Democrats’ decision to hold an all-night colloquy on climate change earlier this year. It’s also not clear that Steyer’s money will be able to match the Kochs’ operation, which raised $400 million for the 2012 election and is promising an even more organized push this year.

Lehane isn’t blind to the hurdles. “The forces in opposition are pretty significant here,” he said. “You’ve got arguably the most well-funded opposition that has been involved in politics, at least in our history, in terms of the fossil fuel industry. You have the inherent political paralysis that exists here in Washington, D.C.”

But he said he’s taking cues from past political and cultural fights, including the country’s shifts in attitudes about gay marriage and smoking.

“The one common denominator when you look at all of those is that change occurred once those issues were defined in moral terms, as right versus wrong, and then used within our political system as a wedge issue,” Lehane said.